"The industry is at a new inflection point," David Anderson, a top executive with SEMI, the chip industry's largest supplier trade association, said, referring to the development of self-driving cars and other Internet-of-Things inventions. "It really positions us well for some long-term growth."
Anderson, who is president of SEMI Americas, was one of nearly 400 people attending SEMI's annual technical gathering, the Advanced Semiconductor Manufacturing Conference.
Anderson said more people registered for the four-day event at the Saratoga Springs City Center — 380 — than ever before.
"We had a record year," Anderson said.
Anderson said a lot of that has been driven by the participation of the auto industry in SEMI and the chip industry in general. The conference moved to Saratoga Springs several years ago because of the proximity to SUNY Polytechnic Institute and GlobalFoundries' Fab 8 chip factory.
New cars today already have all sorts of new chips and computing power on-board, but the autonomous cars of the future will have on-board servers for data analysis and other heavy computing.
Chips will be more in demand as cars become equipped to communicate with one another as well as with "smart cities" that will help guide traffic around congested areas, avoid potholes and accidents and provide updates on weather and other real-time events. New York state just recently began allowing the testing of autonomous vehicles on its roads for the first time.
And the demand won't just be for processing chips but also memory chips, wireless radio chips, power converters and analog sensors. Boosting demand will be all the new infrastructure that will be needed to allow autonomous cars to operate, including new data centers and cloud computing, which will require more memory chips than ever before to save all the information gathered.
GlobalFoundries is uniquely poised because it operates an older chip fab in Vermont that it acquired from IBM in 2015 that specializes in making sensors on 200 millimeter silicon wafers.
Although the technology used to make analog sensors is not as sophisticated as the 300 millimeter process used for cutting edge chips, 200 millimeter fabs will be in high demand as the use of sensors in self-driving cars grows exponentially.
"We're seeing a resurgence in that," Anderson said of 200 millimeter manufacturing. "And we can't build enough new fabs to supply the memory (chips) required."
©2017 the Times Union (Albany, N.Y.) Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
